Author: thepassionatereader

An investigative reporter documents the meteoric rise and equally rapid downfall of a Silicon Valley startup. The appropriate subtitle is Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup. Elizabeth Holmes, from early childhood, professed a desire to become a billionaire, and dropped out of Stanford after two semesters of chemical engineering to found Theranos, achieving her monetary goal in her early twenties.

The basis of the promise to investors was to use minuscule blood samples obtained from finger pricks to measure many components related to hematology, biochemistry, microbiology, toxicology, and endocrinology, with rapid reporting. The vision included using the revolutionary technology in the military, doctor’s offices and even making it available to anyone willing to pay for tests with stations in public spaces such as retail pharmacies. Holmes succeeded in pitching this new technology to pharmaceutical giants Pfizer and Novartis, the retail pharmacy giant Walgreens and the Safeway grocery chain. Venture capitalists piled in with billions of dollars, driving Holmes’s net worth to over four billion dollars. The company attracted praise and investment from George Schultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, General James Mattis, the Waltons of Walmart fame, The DeVos family of Amway fame, Bill Frist, Robert Murdock, and Carlos Slim, among other household names. Holmes was featured on the cover of Fortune magazine, and was flattered in The New York Times, Time magazine, The Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. She dressed, talked and acted like a female Steve Jobs, and befriended the Clinton and Obama families with several visits to the White House.

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The problem was the technology simply didn’t work much of the time or was unreliable and could not provide consistent results, as could have been predicted by anyone expert in laboratory medicine. But the lab was staffed by bright chemists, computer scientists and engineers with no training in medicine. The coverups included using venipuncture samples run on conventional laboratory analyzers, diluting samples to run though those machines (predictably decreasing accuracy), and even faking results. No one seemed to be familiar with the elaborate regulations applicable to running a medical laboratory; many patients got alarming results requiring extra tests and expenses.

The president, Ramesh ‘Sunny’ Balwani, who was also Elizabeth Holmes lover and roommate, is portrayed as a paranoid ruthless ruler who isolated parts of the company from each other, enforced secrecy and fired anyone who raised concerns about anything at all. Turnover was always high and morale low. Lawsuits abounded with threats to anyone who expressed concerns and private detectives hounded deserters.

The author, employed by the Wall Street Journal, between assignments, received a tip about the problems from a lab medicine blogger and began a rigorous investigation in 2015. Robert Murdock was heavily invested in Theranos, and owns News Corp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal. To his credit, despite threats from Theranos lawyers, he refused to break the firewall between the editorial and reporting arms of The Wall Street Journal to prohibit, delay, or alter the publication of Carreyrou’s bombshell front page report; that story and others that rapidly followed was largely responsible for the crumbling of the castle built on quicksand that was Theranos.

It is probably too much to expect that a Wall Street Journal reporter would expand on this frightening story to speculate about what it says about the greed inherent in unbridled capitalism that drives people to lie, cheat, and swindle investors, and flaunt the law, and he does not do so. But his investigative reporting was daring and the story is told in a fair and balanced way. However there probably are many other companies, whether in Silicon Valley or not, with equally corrupt practices- they just haven’t been exposed yet.

Besides an HBO documentary this year, the Netflix movie adaptation of this story, in the planning stages, is to star Jennifer Lawrence as Elizabeth Holmes. I may have to watch it.

This is a timely read as the trial of Elizabeth Holmes and Sunny Balwani on multiple counts of fraud is set to start next week, with possible twenty year prison sentences. But it seems to me that the most lenient sentence should at least include restitution charges sufficient to keep them in poverty for the rest of their lives.

At the very least, this tale should be seen as a powerful argument for better protections in law for brave corporate whistle-blowers.

‘The Departure Lounge’ is the name the author gives to the New Jersey home of her increasingly demented mother and her equally demented second husband at the turn of the century. Money appears to be no issue with a large staff of caregivers, but they prove incapable of preventing crisis after crisis, necessitating many emergency trips from Federico’s home and family in Halifax, to New Jersey. The chaos she finds on those visits provides the bulk of the story narrated here. It alternates between being hilarious and terrifying, with insights into the pre-morbid quirky personalities of both of the geriatric subjects, and into the ambivalent relationship between mother and daughter.

A second ill-considered marriage in their 80s, opposed by family on both sides is certainly not unusual, but when both the bride and groom are high society alcoholics with unrecognized early dementia, the results are disastrous. When Mrs. Huber falls down drunk, the paramedics “recoiling from her 90-proof breath” deliver her to the hospital where she “sat bolt upright on the gurney and yelled ‘I demand an autopsy’ before passing out again.”

There is much to be learned from this memoir. It is not easy for any family member to deal with a parent’s mental decline in an objective way. Clearly, all concerned would have been better off by somehow getting the old folk into an appropriate assisted living environment. But they refused as often is the case. The failure of medical professionals to recognize and declare mental incompetence is also common. Family members go on guilt trips about locking parents up against their wishes. Sibling disagreements and conflicts abound. The result is unnecessary risk, stress, and expense for everyone. I hope that if/when I need to be institutionalized, I will still have enough insight and common sense to not resist. Better still however would be to, like most of my relatives who have died, remain mentally competent and physically independent until my last week or day or hour of life.

This wealthy family seemed to think that their problems could be solved by throwing more and more money at them, hiring more and more caregivers and professionals, but it just doesn’t work that way. The hired staff often did little but collect cheque’s and steal jewellery.

I am not sure that the mother’s dementia was due to the Alzheimer’s disease or a stroke that was finally diagnosed. As an alcoholic with erratic eating habits she would certainly be at risk for Wernicke-Korsakoff syndrome and some of her conversations seem to be the very convincing confabulations characteristic of that syndrome. Armchair diagnosis is so much fun and so easy!

There are some great insights into the complicated process of growing old. My favourite quote is “The real curse of old age is not the looming grave; it’s outliving your friends.”

Like Elizabeth Hay’s All Things Consoled , this memoir could be a very depressing read. Fortunately, the author manages to sprinkle it with a hefty dose of humour that makes it very enjoyable and thought-provoking.

This spy thriller, sitting on a park bench, deserted and a bit stained, with no one around, invited me to sit down and read a bit of it; then I rescued it from the threatening rain and put it on the bottom of the pile of books to be read. This is #17 of Mariani’s now 18 spy novels, all featuring ex-SAS operative Ben Hope, repeatedly coming out of retirement for one last assignment. This is the only one I have tackled, or ever will.

The diverse list of characters includes an elderly billionaire French industrial tycoon, his niece, her expert code-breaker ex living in Moscow, their 12 year old daughter, a group of ruthless Russians trying to take control of all humanity by using secretly coded brain implants to program people’s thoughts, a conspiracy-theory nutcase, and, of course, Ben Hope, the James Bond-like master spy. The extreme importance of a missing1957 coded cipher to the modern plotters, the central thesis for the entire plot, is never made clear. The idea of controlling behavior with brain implants is interesting but hardly new, already being used medically in some branches of neuroscience; the complete control of us with brain-computer interface devices is the dystopian fear of many imaginative futuristic Artificial Intelligence gurus (and fiction writers) who warn us about being overpowered and made zombie slaves to machines that are smarter than we are.

The plot is extremely complex, with lots of interconnections and unpredictable twists, but the feats of the spy are very unrealistically heroic. He never misses a target even when shooting a pistol over his shoulder while dragging a wounded man through a dense forest in the dark (covering seven kilometres in 90 minutes). There is an oversupply of gratuitous violence and extreme cruelty. The car chase makes James Bond’s automotive exploits seem like a tame scenic drive through a park on a Sunday afternoon.

Obviously many readers enjoy the over-the-top unrealistic action of Scott Mariani’s thrillers, as he has sold more than 2 million books in his native Great Britain alone. But at least I did not waste money on this one. I prefer my spies to be more realistic, or at least to be pursuing something that is of obvious importance.

I am not sure what differentiates a book from a booklet, but regardless of that distinction, this little volume with the subtitle of Twenty Lessons From The Twentieth Century is a gem from a well known Yale Professor of History. Without ever mentioning Donald Trump by name, he goes where most others have feared to tread by making direct comparisons between him and his tactics of securing power with those of Hitler, Stalin and a variety of other power-hungry dictators. Short chapters include advice such as Defend Institutions, Beware of one -party States, Be Wary of Paramilitaries, Believe in Truth, Investigate, and Listen For Dangerous Words. These words of caution seem so common sense and obvious that they may seem trite but he uses abundant examples from history and from Donald Trump’s own words and actions to show how often they are ignored, and the dire consequences. Don’t ever assume that it can’t happen here.

A good little history lesson and a great note of caution.

This memoir about the love-hate relationship of the author with her difficult parents (a miserly artist mother and a dour, strict, even cruel, school-teacher father) and the emotional toll of looking after them in their final years of physical decline and dementia will remind many readers of their similar experiences with losses and missed opportunities. But there is little here that could be considered a profound insight into human nature and the story lacks the wickedly morbid humour of fellow Canadian Meg Federico’s 2009 memoir, Welcome to the Departure Lounge, dealing with the same subject matter. I read the latter years ago and will reread it and review it in a few weeks.

The family dynamics, with competition for recognition and affection, the resentment of siblings perceived to be parental favourites, or resentment for not doing their share in caregiving, and the eccentricities that inevitably develop in some members of a large extended family, make for interesting reading that are easy to relate to. I easily related to the description of the culture of small town western Ontario; although Hay never divulges an address, I could fairly accurately pinpoint on a map where the family lived in Renfrew, Wiarton, Guelph, Owen Sound, Mitchell, London and Ottawa, having lived in Owen Sound, London, and Ottawa and visited all the other towns and cities.

In this family there seems to be an excess of hugging and kissing, perhaps to compensate for deeply ambiguous true feelings. And it is apparently easy for all the family members to take offence at what others do, don’t do, or say or don’t say, with easily bruised egos, insecurities and low self-esteem. The author declined, unwisely in my humble opinion, to engage in ‘therapeutic lying’ when her demented mother repeatedly asks where her husband is or if he is joining them for a walk several months after his death. See the late Oliver Sacks’ discussion reproduced in the March 4, 2019 issue of The New Yorker for a compelling argument for compassionate lying in such circumstances.

Hay never acknowledges taking liberties with the dialogue, but, unless she lived with a hidden recorder, the nonsensical ranting of her demented mother, among other dialogues, must be paraphrased. Likewise, she claims to recall events from her life as a two-year-old, although studies show that accurate memory recall by adults never includes anything before age 3.5.

There are probably many older readers like me who develop anxiety reading about the descent into dependency and dementia, wondering if that lies in their future. Perhaps that is, at least in part, why I am ambivalent about recommending this book, even though it is very well written. At the very least, common experiences such as those narrated here, provide a powerful argument for liberalizing advance directive and right-to-die laws.

I recently rediscovered a few of the late Sir John Mortimer’s books that I had read years ago. This is not so much a book review as a character review: Rumpole of the Old Bailey, who repeatedly tries to convince Hilda, his wife, She Who Must Be Obeyed, that he is not a ‘character’. With more than 20 books of short stories featuring the bewigged Rumpole, it is surprising that I recently met several people who had never heard of Rumpole nor the expression ‘she who must be obeyed’, a term for a domineering wife that is plagerized from an earlier novel by Henry Rider Haggard.

Horace Rumpole is a criminal law attorney at the Old Bailey courthouse in London. His antics before judges and in Chambers, as well his love-hate relationship with Hilda, (he frequently ‘escapes from domestic bliss’ to drown his sorrows with a bottle of ‘Chateau Fleet Street’) show off quintessential British humour at its best, and fellow attorneys, solicitors, clerks and judges are almost as eccentric as the curmudgeonly Rumpole. Loaded with irony and abundant puns, Rumpole’s speeches before judges often result in acquittal of the most obviously guilty hardened criminals, based on unpredictable twists in the narrative of the crime as the evidence unfolds. And the criminals also come to life, often as quite likeable characters in their own right. The description of a man accused of manslaughter is typical. “His beaky nose and tuft of receding hair, combined with a paunch and long, thin legs, gave him the appearance of a discontented heron.”

Years ago, I read the unauthorized biography of John Mortimer by Graham Lord, and was disappointed to read about his turbulent personal life with affairs, a secret romantic fixation with a gay fellow barrister that resulted in his expulsion from Oxford, a bitter divorce, and an unacknowledged illegitimate son. Perhaps these experiences lead to his ability to develop the the eccentric characters that populate his stories, and seem to reflect his own eccentricities.

Vera is adamant that Rumpole in books is far better than in the films, but for non-bibliophiles, the Rumpole as portrayed by Leo Kern in the long-running BBC series is pure gold that will force chuckles out of the most dour viewers. Your chance to vote-Rumpole in books or Rumpole on film?

Pick up any Rumpole book for a summer day at the beach or cottage and you run the risk of missing out on any activities that the rest of the family may be engaged in, as you chuckle to yourself.

In this strange novel, translated from the original Portuguese, a car driver in an unspecified city in an unspecified country, in an unspecified year, suddenly goes blind while waiting at a stop light. A stranger drives him to his home, then steals his car and then also goes blind. In short order, everyone of their contacts also go blind, leading to a rapidly expanding colony of quarantined blind folk in an an abandoned mental institution- with one unexplained exception. Starvation, treachery, thievery, rape, killings and filth ensue as everyone in the whole city goes blind except for the one devious woman. In the last four pages, the characters progressively, one after another, suddenly regain vision.

This is supposedly a surreal allegory and a vivid bitter parable, but to me it comes across as a weak excuse to depict the worst traits of human beings under unimaginable stresses. The description of starving people covered in excrement, looting, robbing, raping, and killing each other serves no useful literary purpose as far as I can tell.

Without intimate knowledge of rules of Portuguese grammar and punctuation, I cannot determine whether the author or the translated is more to blame for breaking all the elementary rules of English grammar and punctuation. There are three page paragraphs with dialogue from multiple characters without quotation marks, run-on sentences that make up a full page, strings of short clauses in place of sentences, and questions with no question marks. Apparently breaking the rules of grammar was something the author was proud of and reviewers rewarded it with a Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. But I found it just annoying.

Only understood if at all, perhaps from the perspective of the author who was a member of the Portuguese Communist Party, is the following description of speeches of a group of the blind:…. “extolling the virtues of the fundamental principles of the great organized systems, private property, a free currency market, the market economy, the stock exchange, taxation, interest, expropriation and appropriation, production, distribution, consumption, supply and demand, poverty and wealth, communication, repression and delinquency, lotteries, prisons, the penal code, the civil code, the Highway Code, the telephone directory, networks of prostitution, armaments factories, the armed forces, cemeteries, the police, smuggling, drugs, permitted illegal traffic, pharmaceutical research, gambling, the price of priests and funerals, justice, borrowing, political parties, elections, parliaments, governments, convex, concave, horizontal, vertical, slanted, concentrated, diffuse, fleeting thoughts, the fraying of the vocal cords, the death of the word.” (My autocorrect refuses to let me write the Highway Code without the capitals!)

Thanks, Andra, but this one is going to the William’s Court lending library. Obviously many people appreciated it, but I was not one of them.

Another of the seemingly endless WWII historical novels, this one deservedly won the 2015 Nobel prize for fiction. Like Kristen Hannah’s The Nightingale and Pierre Lamaitre’s Au Renoir La Haut, it is set mainly in occupied France, in this case, in the small Brittany port city of Saint-Malo, as well as Paris. Narrated by the author in the present tense throughout, it covers the entire war time period, with follow up of several surviving characters up to 2014; the author makes extensive use of the well-worn time shift literary device for the events of the war period, but the time frame and the numerous characters are not particularly hard to follow. The wartime history of the city seems accurate as far as I can tell, although the technical skills of the secret resistance radio developers and the elaborate scaled down model of the city that the blind girl uses to navigate may be exaggerated.

The poignancy of the losses in war, the cruelty as well as heroism of warriors on all sides of the conflict (a Nazi soldier with increasing unease about their goals risks his life to sabotage their plans) and the stamina, determination, and bravery of civilians and soldiers alike are all vividly displayed. But this is not what makes this story uniquely beautiful. The rich scenery and the graphic characterizations are intertwined with observations of universal truths, not just about Homo sapiens, but about all life and all of nature, and the transience and frailty of our life on earth and of our relationships. The blind teen, Marie-Laure Leblanc, with overly developed senses of touch, taste, smell and hearing to compensate for her lack of vision, almost seems to shout in defiance to the reader “Don’t give up”.

Two quotes may give you some sense of the beauty of the observations.

“At Madam’s suggestion, they lie down in the weeds and Marie-Laure listens to the honeybees mine the flowers and tries to imagine their journeys as Etienne described them; each worker following a rivulet of odor, looking for the ultraviolet patterns in the flowers, filling baskets in her hind legs with pollen grains, then navigating, drunk and heavy, all the way home.”

And a great analogy to the world of war propaganda:

“Do you know what happens, Etienne, … when you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water?…It jumps out. But do you know what happens when you put a frog in a pot of cool water and then slowly bring it to a boil? …. The frog cooks”.

Thanks, Andra.

This true spy story from a former FBI operative provides an insider’s account of how espionage agents actually work. Tapped in 2000 to trap a suspected senior member of the FBI who was selling confidential information to the KGB over many years, he was chosen to work with the suspect and collect the crucial evidence because he was junior in the spy world and would never be suspected as a mole, by the culprit. The archaic methods of the FBI at that time with respect to internal security are almost laughable if the consequences had not been so dangerous. The actual culprit’s motives for selling top secret documents to the Russians are still unclear. In every respect he seemed outwardly to be a patriotic American, and was a devout Catholic member of the Opus Dei branch and a crusty humourless fanatic who tried to convert the author to his radical brand of Catholicism, and was hoping to coerce him into also working covertly for the KGB. He is now behind bars for the rest of his life-and collecting an FBI pension!

There were several times when the plan to trap the suspect came dangerously close to becoming completely unravelled. Although the risks of undercover work may be embellished a bit, the devious methods and secrecy of all parties are fun to read about. But it takes a terrible toll on relationships and families when they are constantly lied to, and kept in the dark about the actual work. Spies, and to a lesser extent, cops, are trained to trust no one, suspect everyone, and, if necessary, blatantly lie about what they actually do on the job. It probably takes a certain personality bordering on paranoia to do well in this field, and an outlook that sees everyone as flawed, secretive, suspect, and dishonest. I may be overly trusting of relatives, friends and strangers alike, and I could never adopt the world view of a spy. A recent social sciences controlled trial reviewed in The Economist concluded that, around the world, more people are honest than population surveys thinks are.

The writing style is a bit prosaic, and there may be some minor elements of hyperbole and self-congratulatory smugness, but the author seems like the kind of fellow that would make a great neighbour to share a beer with in the back yard. The last few pages outlining the shift of counterintelligence and spying to the cyberworld are instructive but not really part of the main story.

An engaging true story about how spies actually work, better than most James Bond-type spy fiction.

This British economist, writer, and broadcaster here discusses 50 inventions that have had a major impact on the modern economy. These range from the obvious, such as the plow, the

the shipping container, paper, the pill and the light bulb, to the obscure such as the the Billy bookcase and the plumbing S-bend. The choice of what to include is necessarily arbitrary; the romp through the history of their invention is entertaining and very educational, a broad brush stroke of the history of invention, but somewhat constricted to those of major economic importance, or at least of importance to economists.

This is the kind of book that can be read in airport lounges, or when you have short gaps in your leisure time. one short chapter at a time, without losing track of the whole. And if an invention does not interest you, skipping a chapter will not detract from the value of the book.

Not all of the inventions have had a positive impact, witness leaded gasoline and antibiotics in farming, which are discussed with careful balance. The discussion of the contributions of governments in the encouragement or suppression of innovation is likewise balanced and enlightening.

The elimination of lead as a gasoline additive coincided chronologically and geographically in the U.S. with with a decrease in crime rates. But this is correlation (albeit with a plausible physiological cause-and-effect explanation) not a proof of cause and effect. An alternative explanation for that correlation is postulated by another rogue economist, Stephen Levitt in Freakonomics- that the decrease in crime rates was due to the decrease in the population of unwanted children resulting from the Roe vs Wade 1973 ruling. Who is right, or are they both?

Humour is sprinkled throughout and Harford shows a keen appreciation of irony, for instance relating that Thomas Midgley, the inventor of leaded gasoline was treated for lead poisoning before advocating for addition of tetraethyl lead to gasoline, and was later strangled to death by one of his own serial inventions. Names of famous inventors are interspersed with names of people I had ever heard of who made equal unrecognized contributions.

The list does not include some things that seem obvious candidates for the list to this non-economist. Why are the inventions of the Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Alexander Fleming, Marie Curie, and Marconi not included? While Otis’s elevator makes the cut, the construction crane that facilitates the building of skyscrapers needing elevators does not. And while the agricultural use of antibiotics is included, the invention of the microscope that allowed for the discovery of all manner of microorganisms is not. The S-bend in plumbing prevented the stench of raw sewage from backing up into London homes via the new-fangled indoor toilets, but surely the sewage treatment processes that convert the raw sewage into potable water was equally important but is never mentioned. The internal combustion engine and the assembly line also failed to make the cut. Perhaps he is saving them for his next book?

I generally avoid books that promise a list in their title as they tend to be preachy self-help pap, but this is a highly educational, light, easily digested read that I highly recommend. Thanks, Tony.

My knowledge of English literature is remarkable for a gaping hole where classic novels should be, most of which I know of only by virtue of frequent references to them in subsequent works. In school we were exposed to a smattering of Homer (in Latin class), Chaucer, Shakespeare, a few dead white male poets, Shaw, T.S. Elliot, and Victor Hugo. At home we memorized scriptures, read Thornton W. Burgess nature stories, Twain, Zane Gray, and C.S. Lewis, but Darwin and enlightenment philosophers were verboten and I can not recall studying anything written by a woman, nor anything in translation from a foreign language. Ironically, after getting an Ontario Scholarship based largely on my high school English marks, I failed English 20 as a freshman at Western, concentrating on sciences. During my working career, I managed to devour many of the novels of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pasternak and Solzhenitsyn, and some Graeme Green and James Agee, in addition to the medical literature I needed to maintain my competence. Post-retirement, I tried to expand my reading choices but got trapped by curiosity into reading mostly philosophy, neuroscience, history, and biographies. As a result I am still very uneducated in English classics – no Plato, Greek mythology, Dickens, Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Stevenson, Woolf, Doyle, Proust, Swift, or Faulkner. I can never fill in this gap now, but occasionally I try, as with what follows. And partly because I have two part-Indian grandchildren, I chose to start with….

A Passage To India. E.M. Forster. 1924, 306 pages (not including editor notes, Appendices and a long introduction).

There are several slightly different editions to this classic. The one I read is, I think, the Everyman Edition, edited by Oliver Stallybrass published in 1957. The title is apparently taken from a Walt Whitman poem that I have not read. Set in the early twenties in a fictional town in central India during the Raj, the domineering bigoted smugness of the British rulers and the deep undercurrents of rebellion in the oppressed, generally poor natives divided by caste, culture and religion are lucidly dramatized. The conflicting cultural outlooks are exposed most notably by the differing interpretations of an apparent sexual assault by a native on an English woman in a dark cave outside the divided town.

The cast of characters is diverse and it is easy to get lost in the complex plot, the foreign-sounding names, and the symbolism of the different religious rites, but I really enjoyed this story. In order to fully appreciate the complexity, it probably should be read twice and studied, not just read. Or as a last resort, I could watch the Hollywood adaptation, probably a shortcut to banality.

If this classic had been studied in our Grade 12 English Lit class, I could guess at Don Birtwhistle’s homework assignment questions:

1) Did Forster achieve a balance in showing respect and understanding for both the British and the native Indian cultures? Justify your answer.

2) Discuss the possible explanations for the incident in the cave. Which is the most likely? Provide reasons for your choice in 200 words or less.

3) Compare and contrast the moral outlook of Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding.

I could now ace this assignment by finding answers on the internet, but it would have been tough in 1962.

The India that is on display no longer exists and the demise of the Raj is presciently predicted toward the end of the story. And there is certainly no residual of this India in my grandchildren. But it is a timeless great history lesson and a good read.

This easily wins the prize for the most bizarre novel I have ever read, or even heard of. It is fortunately not nearly as long as the number of pages would suggest as some pages have only a heading and one line of few words. Other sections consist of more than a full-page run-on single, bold-typed sentence heading followed by a few lines of nonsensical text. The author is a professor of English in the creative writing program at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; in retrospect that should have been a clue that I would not enjoy his writing. It is my impression, based on nothing but a hunch, that teachers of creative writing desperately try to outdo each other in weirdness and idiosyncrasy in their esoteric writing, forming a body of eclectic literature that us lesser mortals can never appreciate.

It is not just the format that is weird. It seems that a plot is optional and what little there is makes no sense, with many frayed loose ends; the characters are equally confusing. It is not clear whether it is the author or the narrating character that is in the manic phase of a bipolar disorder, unable to finish sentences, concentrate, or follow a line of thought, with a bad example of pressured speech. Or perhaps a paranoid schizophrenic high on magic mushrooms or LSD. Non-sequesters and garbled sentences abound. “I squirmed in a dream in which I encountered the space at the center of me that was not me. The space was made up of a form of matter that was so unstable that it was impossible to make a study of it just by being near it once. I touched its surface; my hand stuck. Space, I said, not moving my mouth, how are you in me but not me. Every window in the city broke….. I tore an alley down into itself. My hand broke off at the wrist.”

I should have given up at this point, but the lavish if somewhat muted praise by seven fellow authors on the jacket kept me going, hoping there was some hidden deep existential insight or at least something more than nonsense in this narrative. If there is, I missed it completely. On reflection, I realized that I had never heard of any of the authors praising this book, nor of their books. But a cursory online search reveals that at least five of the seven are teachers of creative writing. I rest my case.

This intrepid, restless, young Canadian here writes an engaging and enlightening travelogue of her risky and demanding year-long travel, mostly by bicycle, through China and Tibet, and then from Turkey through Central Asia to India and Tibet trying to retrace the Silk Road. Like the late Christopher Hitchens, she seems happiest when alone in dangerous situations, far away from anything that could be called civilization. Along the way she reflects on the meaning of borders she prefers to ignore, whether political, geographic, physical or mental, with stunning analogies, metaphors, and similes. But she never judges any political borders harshly. Her political allegiances remain a enigma.

The risks of hypothermia, heat stroke, starvation, altitude sickness, falls off an icy mountain pass, endemic diseases, or incarceration by hostile natives provide the adrenaline rushes she seems to need to feel alive. Is there some unique genetic brain wiring that makes some people head off on dangerous hikes to the earth’s poles, peaks or bleak uninhabitable deserts? But she is no antisocial loner. Although her home, where I suspect she spends little time, is apparently in remote British Columbia forest off the grid, she developed strong bonds with fellow Rhodes scholars at Oxford, her teachers at M.I.T., with her intermittent fellow adventurers, and with natives along the route. But she declined a desirable cushy lucrative career as a biology lab researcher, preferring to study nature in the raw, cruel outdoors. And far from being an uneducated wanderer, she discusses the lives and writings of Darwin, Marco Polo, various philosophers, Indian mystics, the Dali Llama, Homer, Goethe, John Muir, Thoreau, and Carl Sagan in the context of her travel experiences.

There is a very helpful map of the route provided at the front: it needs to be consulted frequently by those of us who are geographically challenged, but I was often still unable to pinpoint the progress of the travellers. Perhaps that is the point- she thills in getting lost and probably intends to let her readers do so also.

There must be a great temptation to adapt this journey into a Hollywood movie or a T.V. serial, and the scenery could be stunning, but I doubt that the beauty of the writing could ever be conveyed in another medium.

So many good quotes. “We need this world and this world doesn’t need us. Why do we persist in behaving as if the converse was true?” “The true risks of travel are disappointment and transformation: the fear that you will be the same person when you go home, and the fear you won’t.” And to succinctly capture her outlook on life. “We are here only by fluke and only for a little while. So why not run with life as far and as wide as you can?”.

Thanks, Michelle.

Last Girl Lied To L.E. Flynn, 2019, 344 Pages.

I picked out this new modern day thriller only because of a couple rave reviews on the jacket and because the author lives in London, Ontario, although I had never heard of her in the fifty one years I lived there. I had difficulty relating to the characters, given that they are almost all teenage students in a California coastal town in 2018. Perhaps my imagination just won’t stretch that far.

The introspection, peer pressures, lies, conflicts, longings and lusts, wild drunken parties, casual hookups (a term that did not exist in this context when I was a teen- it meant hooking up an implement to a tractor), jealousies, extreme emotional lability and mental anguish of the characters are totally foreign to me, even as I think back to my experiences as a free-range rural teen. Without texting, email, Google, or even television or booze in the house, the only parties were on the party line phone where one call would bring six or eight men for a day of hard work harvesting oats, wheat or corn. If there were girls trying desperately to get me to hookup, or even date them, I was too naive or too busy studying to notice. We had our eccentricities, but mental illness was never labelled as such and I was only ever aware of two suicides in my community; in this story two classmates appear to commit suicide by drowning, exactly one year apart. And if my urban children in their teens in the 90s with booze, parties, and television readily available experienced the degree of emotional distress of the characters in this book, I was oblivious to it or in denial.

The book is chopped up into 92 very short chapters, not all arranged chronologically. Universally, the characters appear to be white, urban, and from the middle class, not the demographics of present-day coastal California.

In spite of my reservations about the exaggerated characters, the surprise ending is totally unpredictable, unique, and inspired.

I suspect that most present day teens and even their parents will relate to, and enjoy this book more than I did. And I hope that my grandchildren never experience the extreme teen angst depicted here. But I may remember something from this book when they reach their late teens.

Indivisible By Two. Nancy L. Segal. 2005 253 pages.

As the grandfather of fraternal twins, with a lifelong interest in the nature/nurture debate, I read this somewhat outdated book hoping for some insights. This is the second book about twins by this twin Director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton, formerly at the Twin Studies Center at the University of Minnesota. The twelve stories are all interesting in themselves, but are almost all about identical twins, triplets or one set of four, i.e. two sets of identical twin boys from one pregnancy. They do little to add to the extant twin studies that attempt to determine the relative contributions of genetics and environment to physical and mental characteristics. Most twin studies addressing this compare the frequency of specific traits in identical (monozygotic) twins compared to fraternal (dizygotic) twins. In addition, the environmental influences can be suggested by comparing identical twins reared together vs those reared apart, not only with respect to normal behaviour, but also to specific disease susceptibilities.

Several of these stories feature cases of mistaken identity that would make Shakespeare envious. And some highlight the uncertainties and mistakes of adoption systems and bizarre legalities around the world. An identical twin man had to legally adopt his genetic son because that son was carried to term after artificial insemination of his wife’s identical sister as the surrogate mother. With several adoptees in my extended family, the adoption stories were of interest to me. A story of an adoption agencies’ errors in Ottawa gave the book some local colour for me.

There are specific interesting observations that are difficult to explain on a purely genetic or purely environmental basis. Why is only one of three identical triplet men a homosexual, while the other two both have multiple sclerosis, albeit at different stages? (The gay one may also have this affliction, with early symptoms.) Even more confusing is the pair of identical twins, only one of whom is a transsexual. And when identical twins marry identical twins and then have identical twins, the labels can get problematic. Your uncle is then genetically your father, a your mother is genetically your aunt, and your brother is genetically indistinguishable from your father and your uncle.

This book does not even mention the word ‘epigenetics’, a term that came into use in the last 15 years. This refers to the variable influence of environmental exposures to the expression of specific genes; in the past the variability of the result of a gene’s action in different individuals was called ‘variable penetrance’ covering up the true meaning: “We don’t know why this happens”. Epigenetics studies have the potential to explain away much of the discrepancies in the nature/nurture debate, and shed a lot of light on past twin studies.

One does not need a science background to enjoy these twelve stories of human development. In fact, I am not sure it even helps. They are great human interest stories on their own.

It can be enlightening, even if disconcerting to, at least occasionally, step outside your comfort zone and try something that is not part of your usual reading diet. Such is the case of this latest novel from Miriam Toews, a Canadian former Mennonite, and a talented storyteller, for me. The plot is adapted from the true story of women in an inbred Bolivian Mennonite colony of less than 2000, who, in a hayloft, over two days, plot to escape from the culture of male dominance, cruelty, and organized sexual assaults by gangs of men using belladonna to sedate their victims.

The illiterate women’s discussions include deep philosophical musings about their faith, doubts, obligations and dilemmas, abounding in allegory, symbolism and metaphors, and even the meaning of dreams. Open to many different interpretations, there are many pearls of wisdom and insight. The hypocrisy of the Mennonite culture, with secret drunkenness on mistletoe vodka, smoking, and crude language, is on full display. Dedicated feminists will rave about this story.

For a Mennonite writer, there are some glaring errors about the basics of farming. Straw is equated with hay, and kids play with manure in a hayloft, not where manure is likely to be found. Where was the fact checker?

Until about page fifty, I was thoroughly confused about this story, but it grew on me and I quite enjoyed the symbolism of an enigmatic journey, out of something and into the unknown. I can understand why this book has been praised as a classic and is in contention for various literary prizes. But I will not be reading Toews’s other offerings. Nor The Art Of The Deal.

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This autobiography by the former First Lady is unlike most political autobiographies; in fact it is in many ways not about politics at all. To be sure, she lauds her husband’s accomplishments, avoids discussing any of his failures, and derides his political opponents. But she didn’t ask for a life in the limelight, and felt as though life in the White House was constricting and that it limited her ambitions. The latter were and are certainly idealistic and perhaps unrealistic at times, but no one, regardless of their political viewpoint, can fault her motivations.

The book is divided into three main parts, plus a Preface and an Epilogue. Becoming Me, outlines her youth growing up as a poor black disadvantaged girl in increasingly racially segregated south Chicago neighbourhood blighted by white flight, and against all odds then attending Princeton and Harvard Law School. She became a corporate lawyer in a large Chicago firm but felt unfulfilled serving rich clients and corporations and quit to devote her talents to helping the disadvantaged advance and find meaning in their lives.

Becoming Us details the early years of her relationship with the future president, also an idealistic, cerebral, unlikely Harvard Law graduate, first as a co-worker in community organizations, then as a city hall advocate for changes to improve the lot of the poor in a variety of ways. Their love and devotion to each other seems obvious, even though they frequently disagreed about many issues, not the least of which was whether or not to even bother getting married. When Barrack first ran for public office, she initially only reluctantly campaigned on his behalf, and felt ambiguous about the sacrifices she had to make to do so, over and over again expressing her self-doubt with “Am I good enough?” questions.

Becoming More relates to her years as First Lady determined to support her husband while trying to maintain some semblance of normality for their daughters, and remain true to her principles. She was effective in engaging the public and food corporations to make changes aimed at reducing childhood obesity (in spite of Dr. Robert Lustig’s skepticism, expressed in his book Fat Chance) largely through the private sector rather than through legislation. She dug up part of the South Lawn to establish a vegetable garden, with the help of local D.C. school children, donating the produce to charities, and for consumption by guests. She advocated strongly for the wounded military and their families and, like Malala Yousafzai, for improving the access to education for girls worldwide. She chaffed at the niceties of protocol and the restrictions on her independence imposed by the Secret Service. She was appalled at Donald Trump”s election and refused to smile at his inauguration.

The writing flows naturally and beautifully, expressing her strong opinions, moral clarity, and sense of purpose, with precision. There are so many good quotes that I had difficulty deciding which to use here. I will use only two.

#1, from the Preface: “Now, I think it was is one of the most useless questions an adult can ask a child-what do you want to be when you grow up? As if growing up is finite. As if at some point you become something and that is the end.”

#2, from a point at which her innocent remark on the campaign was distorted and derided by the Republicans and the media, including the ever-sarcastic late Christopher Hutchins: “I was female, black and strong, which to certain people maintaining a certain mind set translated only to ‘angry.’ It was another damaging cliche, one that has been forever used to sweep minority women to the perimeter of every room, an unconscious signal to not listen to what we have to say.”

Today, more than ever, we need to hear from strong, bright idealists like her, regardless of gender, skin colour, ethnicity, religion or nationality, or even age. Bring them on.

If there is anyone who thinks that the United States of America is a democracy that promotes and protects individual rights, freedoms, and the rule of law, at home and abroad, this difficult book will thoroughly shatter their delusions. Although Slahi wrote this memoir in 2005, it covers a period in his life well before that and remained unavailable as a classified secret document until his pro bono ACLU lawyers succeeded in getting an extensively redacted version made available with a Freedom of Information suit in 2012. And the Mauritanian devout Muslim writer remained in custody in Guantanamo until 2016, after the book was published. During much of his 14 year incarceration and torture, he was never given a chance for a legal defence, and he has never been charged with any criminal offence. Nevertheless he was considered to be the most valuable inmate in Guantanamo by the U.S. military brass, with accusatory media stories on CNN about his involvement in the Millennium Plot hatched in Canada to blow up LAX, and a recruiter and planner for the 9/11 attacks.

A lot of background information, ably supplied by Larry Seims in an introduction, notes and footnotes is necessary to understand this diary. In 2010, a U.S. judge ruled in Slahi’s favour in his habeas corpus application, but the generals simply and illegally ignored this ruling, retaining him for a further six years. Rather than decry the military thumbing their noses at the rule of law, the U. S. media castigated the judge’s ruling, having found him guilty in the court of public opinion, most notably in The New York Post. And CNN falsely stated as fact that he ran a website that was used to mastermind the 9/11 attacks.

Slahi is a Mauritanian native who travelled extensively for work, as a qualified electrical engineer. During the Afghani war to overthrow the communist insurgent government there, he joined Al Qaeda mujahideen fighters against the Soviets, his only real connection with a terrorist organization, one that then had the backing of the U.S. He spent 12 years working in Germany, and was interrogated extensively in Senegal and Mauritania in early 2000, at the insistence of the CIA, apparently for no reason other than having attended mosques in Montreal and Mauritania where radical Islamists were also seen. When he voluntarily showed up for further interrogation by Mauritanian police in November of that year, he was detained and turned over to the CIA, flown to a secret prison in Jordan for eight months of torture, then on to Bagram AirForce base in Iraq, and eventually to Guantanamo. The treatment he details along the way could not be dreamed up by any but the most sadistic inhuman people imaginable, but was approved by the Pentagon and Donald Rumsfeld. He was hidden from the visitors of the International Committee of the Red Cross to Camp Echo in Guantanamo lest the outside world see his extreme malnutrition and many bruises from beatings.

Besides being illegal and inhumane, the torture was remarkably ineffective. There was constant infighting between the military, the CIA and the FBI. The FBI shared computer files on him with the Jordanians, but not with U.S. military intelligence nor the CIA. The redactions in the published book are inconsistent and silly, with, for example, the gender of the interrogators being blacked out only if they were obviously female.

The confessions eventually extracted from Slahi included clear falsehoods. In Jordan, to avoid being sent to Guantanamo, he thought of lying about a plot to kill Mauritania’s dictator president, hoping to be sent back to Mauritania rather than being handed over to the U.S. military. After starting to hallucinate from the tortures in Guantanamo including weeks of sleep deprivation, and with prompting, he agreed with the interrogators that he had plotted to blow up the CN Tower. The interrogators were thrilled that they had finally broken him to confess to a crime, but as Slahi relates “you cannot just admit to something you haven’t done; you have to deliver the details, which you can’t when you haven’t done anything.” He later admits that he had never heard of the CN tower.

Canada does not escape criticism with respect to human rights violations in this memoir, although its role is minor; but just as with Omar Khadr, Canadian prosecutors were involved in Slahi’s case, interrogated him in Guantanamo, and probably in Jordan without revealing their identity and were complicit, if not directly involved in his torture.

I am not suggesting that preventing terrorist attacks is easy, or that some degree of subterfuge, deception, and coercion is not necessary in the interrogation of suspects. But when the people charged with protecting our freedoms become the terrorists, kidnapping and torturing their opponents on presumptions of guilt, we all lose.

My favourite quote: “ The (U.S.) government is very smart; it evokes terror in the hearts of people to convince them to give up their freedom and privacy.”

This is neither an easy nor a fun read, but is sobering, even frightening, and a reminder to all of how fragile and in need of support democracy really is. And it was written before Donald Trump’s cynical attacks on the remaining fragments of democracy. A valuable resource book for any course in Political Science, if that term is not an oxymoron.

P.S. The injustices that this man has suffered continue. Recently, he has been denied a exit visa from Mauritania to obtain medical treatment abroad- for the injuries he suffered during his 14 years of torture.

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Urban demographics vary widely over space and time, and for widely varied and often counterintuitive surprising reasons. With that less-than-profound statement I have summarized much of this Berkley economist’s thesis. Ergo, there is little reason for anyone else to waste their time reading this boring, outdated, humourless, and dry book.

Perhaps I am being too harsh. The author is obviously knowledgeable, sincere, and concerned about the future of America Inc. He makes a valiant but somewhat unconvincing attempt to explain the clustering of high tech companies and headquarters in very limited settings, and to predict the future of many cities and what their demographics will look like, based on a lot of data that often conflates correlation with cause. And, like almost all economists, his unstated assumption seems to be that the holy grail of all human existence is continuous growth in the GDP. In many places, this book reads like a Chamber of Commerce pitch for Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose, close to where the author happens live and work.

He gives no consideration in his wild predictions to effects of climate change, as Manhattan becomes a Venice and eastern parts of Boston join the Atlantic Ocean due to rising sea levels, or to the less likely Black Swan effect when the San Andreas Fault tosses Silicon Valley into San Francisco Bay, my predictions that are themselves uncertain. As Yogi Berra is said to have noted, paraphrasing a Danish proverb “It is tough to make predictions, especially about the future”. A recent review in The Atlantic definitively concludes that, in many fields, the predications of narrowly focused experts even with specialized information, are less accurate than those of well-read generalists, witness the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

The overuse of buzzwords and the hyperbole used to describe the trends and studies he attempts to explain -“profound”,“surprising”,“staggering”,”remarkable”, “ striking”, “stunning”, “breathtaking”, “incredible”,“astonishing” “fascinating”, and “dramatic”- becomes annoying and most of those trends require no doctorate in economics to detect and analyze rationally. Any clear thinker could deduce that when an unskilled, unemployed worker moves from Detroit to seek work in a low-unemployment city, the prospects for work for those in the smaller pool of the Detroit unemployed improve. And one does not need a doctorate in any field to realize that physicians in large cities tend to be more specialized than those in small centres, the Mayo Clinic notwithstanding.

This book was given to me by a Ph.D economist with expectations that I would read it and write a review of it, so I slogged through it. Now you don’t need to.

This Norwegian scholar has here argued vigorously for a view of all religions as entities in a market economy, with various products to sell, customers to lure and governments to lobby for favours. The result is an iconoclastic, scholarly, detailed and wide-ranging treatise that apparently rebuts the arguments of other academics who have objected to this viewpoint. I was not familiar with most of the writing in this field, and found his take on religions as commodities competing in a market economy convincing, perhaps because of my ignorance of the counterarguments.

The writing is humourless, arid, and poorly organized but the scope of the author’s knowledge is encyclopedic, with examples ranging from the split of Buddhism from Hinduism to the competition between evangelical South Korean megachurches and Buddhist leaders. The most effective and appropriate roles of politics in regulating the market for religion is extensively discussed. The discussion of religious terrorism in economic terms is insightful- he suggests that we should be buying the fanatics off, rather than shooting or jailing them!

The analogy of the Catholic Church to a franchise business selling salvation and decreased time in purgatory is very apt. The invention of purgatory in the 12th century itself was a brilliant innovation that facilitated modern capitalism by allowing moneylenders to ply their trade at the cost of buying indulgences, as a business expense. Salvation became monetized. In another sphere, one of the ‘products’ sold in Buddhism is the promise of reincarnation as a higher form of life.

The niche markets in religion include those that cater to disadvantaged and sometimes persecuted sectors of society, such as those that have sprung up to serve the LGBT communities. Brekke identifies women as one such niche and suggests that there may be a big market for a new religion in which God is a woman. He documents the mimicry of religions by atheist and humanist organizations that compete in the market for rites, including confirmations, weddings and funerals. Should atheism and secular humanism be considered as religions?

Chapter 14 on reification discusses the inherent fuzziness of the boundaries of what should be considered a religion at all and what national governments should allow to be considered a religion with the monetary benefits, rights, respect and societal recognition religions frequently enjoy. I think this should have been Chapter 1. And my favourite church, the Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster, recognized as a legitimate religion in New Zealand, but not in the United States, is never mentioned.

This book would make a great text for university courses in comparative religion, but is heavy going for the average Western reader like me.